Affleck Talks The Town with Co-Star Blake Lively

Affleck Talks The Town with Co-Star Blake Lively

– Ben Affleck interviews his The Town co-star Blake Lively for Interview Magazine. Lively, who plays Affleck’s ex-girlfriend, a 29-year old drug-dealing single mother, jokes her way through the interview. They are clearly comfortable with each other–they shot a sex scene together on her first day of shooting.

The 23-year old actress tells Affleck that although she’s from a showbiz family, she didn’t initially want to act. Her brother talked her into auditioning. She landed her breakout role in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by crashing an audition and claiming she was with her brother’s talent agency. She doesn’t feel she had a Hollywood upbringing and therefore doesn’t see a downside to it, “only upsides,” such as getting to eat free craft services. As for watching herself onscreen, “When I saw my first movie, I was fine, but I thought, ‘Oh, my heavens. It’s not about just standing there on my mark and saying these lines. I need to actually act.’ It was great to have my first opportunity be such a big role, but also not great because all of the mistakes I made-the entire learning process was on the big screen for everyone to see…I always need to work harder to be better because it’s still a new craft for me.”

In The Town, although Lively impressed Affleck with her acquired Boston accent, she says “Well, the accent you can always work on, but it was the heart of the character that I felt like I had to capture. You can look at her as a bad person, or you can look at her as a good person who has been put in certain circumstances and does what she needs to do to get by…in a story she might be considered the bad guy, I just don’t believe that things are that simple in life. I think certain people are the way they are for certain reasons that we can’t necessarily judge without knowing.”